Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Tradition, Veda and Law
- I Understanding South Asian Cultural Production: In Search of a New Historical and Hermeneutic Awareness
- II pāṣaṇḍin, vaitaṇḍika, vedanindaka and nāstika: On Criticism, Dissenters and Polemics and the South Asian Struggle for the Semiotic Primacy of Veridiction
- III Being Good is Being vaidika: On the Genesis of a Normative Criterion in the Mānavadharmaśāstra
- IV na mlecchabhāṣāṃ śikṣeta: On the Authority of Speech and the Modes of Social Distinction through the Medium of Language
- V Punishing in Public: Imposing Moral Self-Dominance in Normative Sanskrit Sources
II - pāṣaṇḍin, vaitaṇḍika, vedanindaka and nāstika: On Criticism, Dissenters and Polemics and the South Asian Struggle for the Semiotic Primacy of Veridiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Tradition, Veda and Law
- I Understanding South Asian Cultural Production: In Search of a New Historical and Hermeneutic Awareness
- II pāṣaṇḍin, vaitaṇḍika, vedanindaka and nāstika: On Criticism, Dissenters and Polemics and the South Asian Struggle for the Semiotic Primacy of Veridiction
- III Being Good is Being vaidika: On the Genesis of a Normative Criterion in the Mānavadharmaśāstra
- IV na mlecchabhāṣāṃ śikṣeta: On the Authority of Speech and the Modes of Social Distinction through the Medium of Language
- V Punishing in Public: Imposing Moral Self-Dominance in Normative Sanskrit Sources
Summary
Voices of dissent as essential elements in understanding the textual production of ‘orthodox’ traditions
In a short essay written in 1990, Friedhelm Hardy drew attention to a singular gap in the field of Indological studies. Taking as his example the marginal position to which certain South Asian religious traditions have been consigned, Hardy raised a number of thorny methodological issues. On the one hand, he argued that many of the supposed monolithic ‘givens’ (for example, the ‘true Vedic life’) to which we are accustomed are such only by virtue of the history of the discipline. On the other hand, he argued that the part played by ‘unorthodox distortions’ and ‘sectarian developments’ has not been attributed sufficient weight, and that their historical role may have been anything but marginal. With his characteristic originality and incisiveness, Hardy outlined a research program:
Naively it has been assumed that what the dharmashastras lay down as rules corresponds to actual life. In fact, it is no more than an ideal, a blueprint for a perfect society. […] From this follows that a considerable amount of religious life has been going on that is not as such described in the books on the Vedic dharma. No doubt these books, along with the belief in the Vedas etc., played a far wider role as prestigious norms and ideals than such a hypothetical calculation reveals. But they prescribe, not describe. Once it is realized that things need not actually be what they are supposed to be, according to some normative interpretation, it becomes possible to look at them in their own right and not write them off as ‘unorthodox distortions’ or ‘sectarian developments’ when acknowledging their existence at all. Thus a vast realm is opened up for the study of a ‘Hinduism’after and outside the Veda in senso stricto [sic].
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- Information
- Tradition, Veda and LawStudies on South Asian Classical Intellectual Traditions, pp. 43 - 112Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2011